My 10 year old 4 foot tall indoor grown seedling citrus tree hasn had a bloom yet, what is wrong?
10 years may be long enough, but 4 feet tall from seed is the problem. Citrus trees, like most plants, don’t measure their maturity in years, as do humans; rather, they measure it in number of nodes (points where the leaves are attached to the stem) from the original seed. So in a grapefruit tree, to get enough nodes along the stem, you usually need a tree 15-20 feet tall. If you keep pruning it to keep it indoors, it will never get there. Say you have an 8′ tree at node 247. Assume that grapefruit starts flowering on node 589. (I’m making these numbers up; no one, to my knowledge, has ever counted the exact numbers for grapefruit, but we do know that citrus works this way). Now assume you prune your tree back to 4 feet. Now you’re back to, say, node 120. When it grows again, it will start counting at 121, 122, etc. With continuous pruning, it may never get around to making mature wood. There are a few ancient seedling groves left in Florida, and even on those 100+ year-old trees, if y
